Sixteen-year-old musician Mark Purvis longs to break into the jazz scene of 1925 Harlem, but when he becomes embroiled in a bootlegging scheme with real-life jazzman Fats Waller, he has to find a way to pay off an angry mob boss for losing the liquor. Mark has a job at The Crisis, a magazine headed up by W. E. B. DuBois and published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As expected, his lovably carefree and occasionally clueless personality gets him into an insurmountable pile of trouble, yet it energizes both the plot and era with a contemporary vitality that today's hip-hop and pop-culture fans will appreciate. In this quickly paced and laugh-out-loud narrative, Myers brings Mark face-to-face with a dazzling host of Harlem Renaissance A-listers, including Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen. Their swift, red-carpetlike entrances and exits ignite the hot New York City summer setting with the electricity of creativity and reform. As the story progresses, Mark's awareness of his surroundings and contributions to the cause grow stronger and stronger, and no doubt that's exactly what Myers hopes his readers will realize for themselves as Mark's story unfolds.
—Hillias J. Martin, New York Public Library
Summary and Review provided by: School Library Journal - Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
Harlem Summer, written by Walter Dean Myers. New York:Scholastic, 2007.Print.
This is a great story about friendship across the racial divide. This is a great story about overcoming obstacles and pushing yourself. The book would be a good introduction to the NAACP and the history of the Harlem renaissance and what that looked like for people living in Harlem. This would be a good book to have a discussion about racial tensions and the history of Jazz and NAACP in Harlem.
No comments:
Post a Comment